Jenny Penberthy

LORINE NEIDECKER: COLLECTED WORKS

"Lorine Niedecker proves a major poet of the 20th century, just as Emily Dickinson was for the 19th. Bleak indeed that both should have been so curiously overwritten and ignored, when their work defined the time in which they lived with such genius. Jenny Penberthy has provided an excellent text and a comprehensive, detailing introduction. Finally, we have the collected poems of that poet whom her peers thought the very best of their company. Now one can know why."-Robert Creeley

"Lorine Niedecker was neither a Sappho nor an Emily Dickinson. She was a mid-western-born, self-created modernist who worked as a librarian, a floor-scrubber, a WPA writer, a housewife; and whose acrid, vitally alive poems earned her the admiration and friendship of her poetic peers. Jenny Penberthy's edition of Niedecker's collected work places her where she belongs, in the front ranks of American poetry and poetics."-Adrienne Rich

"Not since the appearance of the facsimile version of
The Waste Land
in 1971, which clearly established how T.S. Eliot's poem had been transformed by Ezra Pound's editing, has a new edition of an American poet's work shattered the prevailing sense of that writer's art. Niedecker may have lived in a marshy backwater, but thanks to Penberthy's meticulously edited volume she can no longer be treated as an unintellectual pastoral miniaturist." -John Palattella in
The Nation
[link to:
http://www.thenation.com/article/blue-clear-down
]

LORINE NIEDECKER: WOMAN AND POET

NIEDECKER AND THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH ZUKOFSKY, 1931-1970

"...it is gradually becoming clear that in terms of rhythmic resource alone Niedecker's poems repay the closest attention. Jenny Penberthy's scrupulous edition of the poet's voluminous correspondence with Zukofsky (one-time lover and lifelong friend) certainly invites that attention, providing and indispensable companion to what can now be seen as a complex and varied body of work....The collection as a whole also reveals the extent to which the letter-writing often served Niedecker as a preliminary stage of poetic composition....Penberthy's excellent introduction to the volume helpfully situates this most isolated of modern poets in the context of transition and Surrealism, catching the wilder, cosmopolitan side of Niedecker which age never quite effaced." Peter Nicholls,
Times Literary Supplement

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